Here’s another of my collaborations with Malissa Long Wilson. Malissa did this textile piece in response to my poem, so it is an ekphrastic work in reverse. I think she captured the soul of the poem here.

[Note: for a larger view of the broadside, click on the image.]

~Roy Beckemeyer

Broadside art and text copyright by Malissa Long Wilson and Roy J. Beckemeyer. Original 18 by 12 inches with 17 by 11-inch crop lines.

The Wichita Broadside Project sponsored by HarvesterArts, River City Poetry, and the Wichita Arts Council, was the brainchild of April Pameticky. Final results were held as the opening event of Poetry Rendezvoux 2017. This collaborative effort, in which I wrote a poem inspired by Malissa Long Wilson’s great piece of art, is titled “Solar Flair,” and it was one of the broadsides chosen for distribution. We hope you enjoy this.

[If you google “squaring the circle,” you will find it is an ancient geometry problem – constructing a square with the same area as a circle using nothing but a geometer’s compass and a straightedge.]

~Roy Beckemeyer

Broadside art and text copyright by Malissa Long Wilson and Roy J. Beckemeyer. Original 12 by 18 inches with 11 by 17-inch crop lines.

I was thrilled to be notified by Lindsey Martin-Bowen that she had reviewed my first poetry book, “Music I Once Could Dance To,” in goodreads. I am including here a link to the original review, and I have also, with her permission, pasted the review here.Thanks, Lindsey. I feel humbled and honored to have had these words penned about my book. Bless you.

Even if Roy J. Beckemeyer spent most of his life as an aeronautical engineer, he has maintained a poet’s soul and uses poet’s tools—a descriptive, honest voice, vivid imagery, and rhythmic sounds—to generate a sense of characters and of place, some of which no longer exist. Nevertheless, his lyrical poems transport the reader not only to areas in the Midwestern landscape but to a less harried time.

For example, in the poem “Owl,” the reader can sense the elegiac longing for an earlier era in the Midwest landscape (and perhaps in our society nationwide). The bird becomes an emblem of a dying way of life:

. . . the universal truth of a broken owlsuddenly shattered by a strand of barbed wire,gone from magnificent pursuer to wheelingwreck of hollow bones, his wing flailing, cloudof down and feathers floating like incense . . . (l. 1-5 ).

Beckemeyer presents the poem containing the book’s title first, in the section he named “invocation,” a request to God (and/or the muses) to lure the reader into a dance of words to ensure that it be guided by the Divine—or at least, supernatural forces beyond our material world. And his poetry creates music with its alliteration and rhythms. Although he continues the music metaphor in the titles of the book’s five sections (invocation, exposition, theme, variations, recapitulation), his engineering background appears when he weaves in scientific terms without destroying the poem’s rhythm. For instance, in the final poem, “We Discuss the Geomorphology of Life,” he notes “It’s called saltation, I said,/when grains of sand are picked up by the wind/and blown along, dislodging other grains. . . .” (l. 1-3).

Beckemeyer has lived in Kansas most of his life but isn’t a native. He spent his early years in Illinois. Those years etched intriguing imagery into his memories, which unfold often in his poetry. In “A Year in Small-Town Illinois: 1953 in Tanka,” his imagery leads the reader through the calendar via tankas (five-line poems in syllabic counts of 5/7/5/7/7 with the last two lines showing a “turn” from the beginning three). He wrote a tanka for each month. Some of them illustrate life in Illinois, such as the February tanka:

skating on Shoal Creekice cracks like a rifle shotand transforms us bothfrom skaters into swimmershuddled steaming by the fire (l. 1-5).

Others, such as the March tanka about the 1950s television show, “Sky King,” could occur anywhere in the nation during that era:

Beckemeyer brings small surprises with the imagery, too. He illustrates the dance theme in unexpected ways, such as when he describes his wife, Pat, in “At Watermark Books Before the Reading.” He studies her as if she were dancing, “. . .your hands held out before you/as if they are dowsing sticks” (l. 4-5). And he notes “You always do that,/your hands dipping and bobbing/to the hidden rush of words” (l. 6-9).

In a similar vein, “Picking-at-Scabs Blues” in the same section not only picks up on bluesy rhythms, it, too, contains a dance description of the blues performer:

his hands would flutter,open and closed,open and closed,catching at air comingthrough the harpand thrumming it there, (l. 26-31).

Indeed, this collection of poems not only shares the landscape with other descriptions in “Tornado Warnings” and “Nebraska Morning,” its dance-themed poems, such as “Initiation Song from the Prairie,” “Centering” and “Falling,” along with those previously mentioned, lead the reader through dancing lessons and create a music that many of us can still dance to today.

Great fun at the Lit Crawl in Independence, Kansas on July 7th, 2014. Got to read at the Independence Pharmacy, and listeners received free soda fountain drinks while the reading went on. Even sold some books. Thanks to Lori Baker Martin for inviting me to take place in this event and for spearheading the whole festival. Don’t know how she finds the time, but so glad she does.